The networked economy

Chris Burford cburford at gn.apc.org
Sun Oct 17 09:42:28 PDT 1999


At 01:08 16/10/99 +0100, Jim Heartfield wrote:


>But 'where surplus value goes' is always mysterious. As Marx explains,
>the deviation of rate of profit from rate of surplus value disguises the
>origin of the former in labour and exploitation.
>
>A number of Stalinist theoreticians in Britain recently have been
>trading in mystified versions of the economy. Former Marxism Today
>writer Geoff Mulgan (now a senior govt. advisor) wrote about the network
>economy in his book Connexity, where he says, blithely 'a sum of capital
>expands, the web of trading partners widens, the range of products
>diversifies'. But Mulgan fails to understand why 'a sum of capital
>expands'. Similarly Mulgan's old comrade Charles Leadbetter, also know a
>government advisor at the DTI, has written a book called Living on Thin
>Air - which is a double joke: he means that profits just come from
>nowhere, but the consequence is that it is the working class that will
>be living on thin air.
>
>Leadbetter and Mulgan's prejudice that profits arise on alienation is
>reinforced by the experience of raising profits by downsizing and
>through the British economy's dependence upon financial profiteering.
>The origins of profits in exploitation is heavily disguised. But on top
>of that is the political excision of the working class from British
>political life, which serves to make them doubly invisible to the
>capitalist class, no longer having to register their interests in any
>collective sense.

It does not hit the target for Jim H to describe these writers as Stalinist. Marxism Today was very much Eurocommunist.

Could he please provide the chapter and page reference to the quote in Mulgan's book on "connexity" so we can discuss it.

Chris Burford

London



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